MENSTRUATION MATTERS

The Great Perimenopause Cover-Up

Guest Post by Jerilynn C. Prior, Centre for Menstrual Cycle and Ovulation Research

I just read “The Estrogen Dilemma” in Sunday’s New York Times Magazine, and I feel like weeping—in sorrow and deep sadness. This article by Cynthia Gorney is about energetic, intelligent women who feel they must take estrogen in order to survive perimenopause yet have deep worries about its risks. I know personally the anguishing changes that erupt during perimenopause. “The Estrogen Dilemma” also evoked my frustration and even rage. It is wrong that symptomatic women in the midst of the long and stormy midlife transition have to face a conundrum—to take estrogen or not. It arises from a Nixonian-style cover-up of three proven and important-for-women truths: 1) Perimenopause causes higher and not lower estrogen levels. (By perimenopause I mean the transition from fertile menstrual cycles to menopause, or the life phase beginning one year beyond the final menstrual flow.) 2) Progesterone, estrogen’s essential partner hormone, in contrast to estrogen, truly is lower in perimenopause. 3) Women survive perimenopause and “graduate” into a less symptomatic menopause.

Are estrogen levels low in perimenopause? No. Taking all perimenopausal women together (a meta-analysis of published levels comparing within-center young with perimenopausal women) estrogen levels are 26 percent higher (1). For symptomatic perimenopausal women like Cynthia Gormley and myself, estrogen swings to Everest-like peaks and may intermittently be a 1000-fold greater. Perimenopause, for some of us, is estrogen’s storm season (2).

Despite that, ever since estrogen was first discovered in 1926, anything ailing women has been deemed “estrogen deficiency.” And often inappropriately so treated. Thus, estrogen levels must be dropping and low in perimenopause when women become symptomatic—it makes sense because we know that perimenopausal women are running out of their store of ovarian follicles that, after all, make estrogen. That perimenopause-dropping-estrogen idea fits with the fact that perimenopausal women begin to have night sweats. But it doesn’t fit with the reality that night sweats begin while women are still having regular menstrual cycles (3) and thus still have adequate estrogen levels (but the misunderstanding of what causes hot flushes is yet another story).

The evidence that perimenopausal estrogen levels are higher than in the sexiest 20-something is strong and consistent (1;4-9). Why are media articles, consensus documents and authorized definitions still talking about dropping estrogen levels? A cover-up. The first clear evidence for higher estrogen was published from a Melbourne epidemiology study in 1995 (10). The back-story here is telling—the authors measured estrogen levels that were variable but at least a quarter of them were much higher than expected. However, their interpretation was that estrogen levels were dropping. That’s because levels in the 45-55 year old women with regular cycles (whom they wrongly called premenopausal) were higher than in those who’d been without flow for three to 12 months (10). That illustrates the power of what I call “the estrogen myth.” I, who at the time was suffering with puzzling sore breasts, heavy but regular flow and mood swings, was ecstatic to see data that explained my experiences. However, I was horrified at the erroneous interpretation—my colleagues and I wrote an impassioned letter to the editor demanding that the authors “let the data speak” (11).

Now to the second cover-up—lower perimenopausal progesterone. If this were a world where women’s health was guided by science rather than by power-over-women, we would all know that perimenopause, besides being a time of higher estrogen, is a life phase in which progesterone is too low. You ask, “Why are lower progesterone levels important? I thought it causes PMS and breast cancer.” This ignoring or blaming of progesterone is the second major cover-up, and not just for 15 years, but since estrogen’s discovery in the 1920s. Framing women’s reproduction only in terms of estrogen creates the postulate that “Estrogen’s what makes a girl, a girl.” The estrogen myth further asserts that estrogen is the female hormone, much as testosterone is the only important male hormone.

Progesterone, however, is the second essential hormone for women, one that makes egg implantation and pregnancy possible. But progesterone’s job is much bigger than that—progesterone halts the exuberant growth that estrogen stimulates (12), and counterbalances and complements estrogen’s actions in every tissue of our bodies. If women’s health is a jetliner and one wing is estrogen, progesterone is the other wing. Women’s health literally doesn’t fly without both estrogen and progesterone.

You haven’t heard about progesterone’s essential role in women’s health because of the power-driven “estrogen myth.” As Susan Baxter and I wrote in The Estrogen Errors—Why Progesterone is Better for Women’s Health(13), there is a broad and consistent conspiracy to frame estrogen as the source of women’s allure and youthful health. The manufacturers of Premarin (the popular conjugated horse estrogen prescribed for and taken by millions of women) have cleverly crafted this erroneous notion by slogans such as “estrogen deficiency” and “hormone replacement therapy,” and by their support for North American academic gynecology. It isn’t rational, but gynecologists love estrogen (14); their backlash after the Women’s Health Initiative results is further evidence of both the love affair and its illogic.

There is increasing evidence that, in order to be well, women need both progesterone and estrogen throughout most of 30-40 years of menstruating life. With enough estrogen but not enough progesterone, there is increased risk for rapid bone loss and risk for osteoporosis and fractures, breast and endometrial cancer as well as heart disease. So I say, “If estrogen’s what makes a girl, a girl, then, Progesterone with estrogen is what makes a girl, a woman.”

But are there practical reasons for symptomatic women in perimenopause to be aware that their progesterone levels are low? I think so. When I began jolting awake every night in a wringing sweat, taking oral micronized progesterone (bio-identical and sold as FDA-approved, Prometrium®) saved me. It made sense—if estrogen’s too high and progesterone’s too low—take what’s deficient. It is now proven that 300 mg of oral micronized progesterone at bedtime decreases sleep disruption, improves refreshing rapid eye movement sleep and doesn’t cause a foggy mind the next morning (15). There is also reason to believe that progesterone, like medroxyprogesterone (16) will help hot flushes and night sweats. It is important, however, to realize that no drug has been proven effective for perimenopausal vasomotor symptoms in randomized controlled trials. Oral contraceptives were not effective (17) and no study has shown that estrogen works.

Progesterone, based on my clinical and personal experience (2), helps sore breasts, clots and flooding cycles, irritability and also the risk for endometrial cancer (18). Furthermore, I believe it will help women currently using estrogen who wish to stop.

Which brings us to the final cover-up—the fact that we recover from perimenopause. This reality is lost on women when the powers that be blend and conflate the terms “perimenopause” and “menopause,” as did the call-out definition in this article. Furthermore menopause is equated with a supposedly dreadful “estrogen deficiency” when, in reality, low estrogen and progesterone levels are normal for that part of our lives (19). Gail Greendale, a Californian scientist like Roberta Brinton whom Cynthia Gormley interviewed, has shown that we even recover from the mind-muddle of perimenopause (20). Not that I don’t believe the women in this story felt better while taking estrogen—we all get better from perimenopause.

Over and over, women report that they are relieved to become menopausal. For most of us, life following a year after our last flow is kinder and gentler. And, if like me, you are having bad hot flushes and night sweats in menopause, at least medroxyprogesterone, by itself and without estrogen, has been proven highly effective and equivalent to estrogen (16), the hot flush gold standard. Or you, like me, could take progesterone for wicked hot flushes and night sweats, stopping once a year to see whether you still need it.

So—the “Estrogen Dilemma” poses a devil-or-deep-blue-sea kind of impossible choice for women—take estrogen (and its risks) or suffer. This is a false dichotomy. Shame on those who deny good science and perpetuate the erroneous ideas that estrogen levels are dropping in perimenopause, who ignore or blame progesterone and who “forget” to tell women that we survive perimenopause and often live many healthy, happy years in menopause. My wish is that all symptomatic perimenopausal women have access to accurate information, supportive family and friends and strong faith that you, too, will survive estrogen’s storm season (2).

Share this:

2 Comments

Laura Wershler
on April 19, 2010 at 11:31 am

Cynthia Gorney might want to read Dr. Prior’s book: The Estrogen Errors. Then write a new article that challenges everything she wrote about in The Estrogen Dilemma. This piece makes me want to weep, too. When will the cover-up Jerilynn writes about finally be uncovered?

I wish I had known this sooner. Not that my symptoms were that bad, but I’m just now to a year since my last period. My doctor wanted to do some kind of treatment for my very heavy flow the last few years, but I was able to stick it out until it went away. I wonder if progesterone would have helped. Interestingly my clearest symptom of perimenopause was that my periods became regular for the first time in my life.

What has struck me is how few women I know who are going through natural menopause. Almost all my friends and my sisters stayed on the pill until the Dr. decided it was time to stop, which seems to mean they miss those years of perimenopause. So I felt very alone. How are symptoms different for women who have been on the pill?

Subscribe to Blog via Email

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Join 138 other subscribers

Email Address

About Us

We are researchers in the social sciences, the natural sciences and the humanities, health care providers, policy makers, health activists, artists and students from a wide range of fields with interests in the role of menstrual and ovulatory health across the life span.